Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

Late again.  I've been so busy that it's amazing I'm remembering what day it is, let alone getting the energy to do a blog post.  At least when it comes to cleaning and decluttering...I'm getting there.

Every time I see a bug, I get creeped out and worried that I might never get on top of the infestation, but then I comfort myself that while I'm still finding bugs, there's less and less of them as time goes on, so hopefully one of these days I'll go weeks without seeing them instead of days.

I have to say, though, as weeks go, this one was pretty productive, so let's get to that!

1.  Let's start with shopping.  I was THRILLED with my personalized prices on things this week, as well as just general sales and things.  It was a producepalooza this week!  Check out these prices!

• Cherries for 1.68 lb (Personalized price.  I got two big bags, which cleaned and pitted yielded me 1 gallon of cherries for the freezer AFTER we snacked on some too.  And they were super sweet and yummy!)
• 2 lb thing of strawberries for 3.88 (they gave me a limit of one on this one, so I got my one and cleaned it and put it into the freezer to use for things later)
• Grapes 1.99 lb (these were just on sale, but I took advantage of that price)
• Bananas .79 lb (personalized price)
• Cantaloupe 2.88 each (I got one, but it's missing from the photo)
• Watermelon bowl for 2.50 (my daughter really wanted one, so I got it and she ate it for a snack before I could take the picture *laugh*)

When I checked in with the Safeway app to make sure I was getting the right cherries (at 4.99 to 6.99 regular price per lb, I wanted to make SURE I was getting the right thing for sure), I found that they had a couple of freebies that I could load to my card pop up, so I loaded the freebies.  They were for free meat, so I went looking for them.  I couldn't find the cherries I had on personalized price or the free meat at one Carrs, but when I hit my favorite Carrs I found both the meat and the cherries AND I found that they had my favorite frozen fish that is cheap and I've been loving to buy on "reduced for quick sale" which I was worried meant "we're not going to be carrying this any longer" so I got two packages of frozen fish for 2.99 per package.  I hope they continue to carry these as I have loved being able to buy fish for less than like 6.00 per lb.

So, yeah I was able to get free hamburger and free buffalo beef sausages stuffed with bleu cheese (I'm not sure what we're going to think about those, but it was free, so we'll give it a shot :).  The best part is that the free meat was also on sale so I MADE 1.99 per item on the freebies, which went toward paying for the cherries.  It was a pretty awesome shopping trip.

2.  And now onto the other non money spending things I did this week!

I started decluttering as much as I could around here this week as I've found ANYTHING that bugs can crawl under, be undetected for a few days and spread, they do.  So, one of the areas I've been tackling is the pile of frames in my bedroom (small though it is) that I've been meaning to do this or that project with for years and haven't gotten around to it.  This particular project I put at the top of my list because the original picture my daughter did in preschool was mounted on construction paper and the paper was actually disintegrating after all of this time and I was worried it was going to disintegrate her picture right along with it.

To remount the picture, I raided my shrinking stash of scrap booking paper (since it's acid free) and started messing with the patterns I had to see what I could find that wouldn't overwhelm the picture.  I then cut up another, more busy patterned paper and flipped it over so that I could border the entire thing in white to fill out the frame correctly.  I mounted the entire thing with masking tape and then put it in the new frame (I'll get to why I didn't put it back in the original black frame in a second here).  For a .50 garage sale frame and some scrap booking paper I was given as a gift...I think it turned out looking pretty nice (the frame is going to be a pain to dust, though...figured that out when I was dusting it and cleaning it).

3.  So the original frame that the picture my daughter made sat in, well it wasn't an empty frame.  My husband's grandmother had given us a cute picture in a frame of a Scottish boy walking his dog and at the time of my daughter making the picture I didn't have any frames in the house at all and sure didn't have the money to go looking for one, so I took the picture in the frame apart, mounted the drawing to the glass (so as not to damage the print) and put it all back together, carefully (with a couple of pieces of acid free paper in between the print and the drawing to help protect it).  So, when I put the daughter's drawing into the new frame, I reversed what I had done and put the original print back into its frame.  I then hung it up where the butterfly picture that now hangs in the stairway used to hang.  I think it looks nice where it is now and it's nice being able to enjoy the picture in it's original state.

4.  So, I've been cleaning like mad around here and have started the really deep, deep, detail oriented cleaning normally reserved for people that are like showing their houses and things as the bugs are determined, but I'm more so.  One of the areas that was starting to drive me nuts was the bathroom.  The original owners of the house decided to adhere the baseboards in the bathrooms on with some very gooey, very sticky and VERY hard to get off adhesive that over time has just smeared and spread as I cleaned to the point that the bathrooms could be cleaner than clean, but you'd never know it because the edges of the bathroom always looked like the above picture (and yes, you can see the cuts in the linoleum and things in the bathrooms...whoever put it down didn't do a good job).  While deep cleaning under the bathroom sink, I found a wonderful thing that I kept wanting to pick up, but kept forgetting or couldn't afford.

I found my Goo Gone!!!  I knew I had a bottle that we moved with, but could never seem to find it.  Why it was under the bathroom sink, I have NO idea, but hey I found it!!!

So, after about five applications of Goo Gone and some elbow grease, I got the baseboards to look more like this...

So, so much better!!!

5.  While in the kid's bathroom I took some old DAP (caulk that is made for bathtubs and other areas that get a lot of water around them) that was a pain to work with it being so old, and re-caulked their tub.

Their bathroom is now deep deep clean.  I even deep cleaned the toilet brush holder (it's a ceramic holder shaped like a frog...I'll have to share a picture sometime).  The bathroom looks really nice now.

6.  We started to box up the movies so that my son doesn't have such easy access to them.  He was just wrecking too many of them.  So far I got one video shelf completely packed up (pretty much anyway) and we took the books from my daughter's closet and put them out on the shelf where we can actually access them.  It's nice being able to get to the children's books a lot easier.  I then took the board games off of the top of the entertainment center and put them up on top of the bookcase instead.  It definitely made the top of the entertainment center look a lot nicer and it helps to keep the board games up and out of the way.

Speaking of which, I deep cleaned the entertainment center and emptied everything out and vacuumed the lot, just to be safe.

7.  I deep cleaned under the kitchen sink and reorganized everything.  I had to clean out every nook and cranny to remove any old food as the garbage can used to be under there.

Oh and the dish soap I ordered from Amazon came in and all six bottles were in perfect shape!  I was happy with that find :).  I now have dish soap to last me for a while, which is a good feeling.  I saved a couple of the old empty spray bottles to fill up with cleaners later on and things, but I did end up getting rid of a lot of different things (especially empty bottles) that I had been saving in case I needed them.  I fully figured out what I might need versus what I was just on the verge or hoarding and got rid of a bunch of stuff.  It felt good to get things more stream lined.

8.  Turns out I had a pretty epic frugal fail this week.  I made pasta for the son and went to use my spiffy new colander to drain it.  What both my husband and I thought were the perfect sized holes to drain the angel hair pasta in...well it was the perfect size to clog the pasta into the strainer.  It was a mess.  So, I'm back to using my wire mesh strainer to drain the pasta until I can find something better to use.  You win some, you lose some.

We went to the used store while waiting for my son at therapy to see if we could find a strainer.  We didn't find one, but we did find something that we've been looking around for years for...a match holder for our furnace matches!  I've been storing them in a tall tin beer stein for years, but when we saw the match holder for 1.49, we grabbed it quick.  We got home, figured out where we wanted to mount it and onto the wall it went!  It's great having the matches where they can be easily accessible now and the match holder looks nice, so double bonus.

9.  I deep, deep cleaned the upper portion of my stairs this week.  This is a pain because the vacuum with the brush on it doesn't really work on them and then the upholstery attachment for my carpet cleaner broke about two days after I actually started to use it, so I end up having to buy carpet cleaning foam and using one bottle per portion of stairs.  I had one bottle that I could use on these, so I did that.  I still need to get another bottle and do the bottom portion of the stairs, but that will have to wait until pay day.  I also took the vacuum with a small brush attachment on it and scrubbed the cat's scratching post area down really well, removing all the old cat hair from it so that the bugs wouldn't be tempted by it (so far it's been alright, but with me deep cleaning every crack in the house, eventually they are going to get desperate).  I carefully moved the carpet up around the edges and got the vacuum in the nooks and crannies as well as I could to keep bugs from being tempted by that.

10.  I moved the fridge and stove this week and deep cleaned under both of them as well as scrubbing the surrounding cabinets and walls.  Every time I move the fridge, something breaks, most times the water line, and this time was no different as it started to leak at both the shut off valve and where the water line met the fridge.  My husband rushed to get it fixed before going to work and managed it, barely.  I felt terrible about it, but was lucky that I have a husband who can fix things.

The stove I was TERRIFIED of moving as the first time the fridge water line broke, it turned out that not only did they NOT install a shut off valve on the thing, but didn't make the water line long enough to do anything with the fridge, so I moved the fridge out about four inches to get something that had fallen under it and the water line broke off at the floor, I had to vice grip the water shut at the floor while my husband was out of town (thank GOD I knew exactly where the shut off valve for the well was...I made my husband show me first thing when we moved into the house, just in case) and it was a huge mess.  So, to say I was worried about how they installed the stove and whether the gas line was installed with enough slack and that I wouldn't end up with an explosion danger...well it'd be an understatement to say I was terrified about moving it all these years.  Luckily the stove had enough gas line to move the stove out completely, I got the yucky mess under it cleaned up and scrubbed down, and now after all of that mess the kitchen is very, very clean.

11.  I deep cleaned the tops, bottoms and anything that wouldn't cut the heck out of me parts of the heaters this week to keep bugs out of there.

12.  I've found myself enjoying becoming more simplified in some ways as this whole deep cleaning mission has gone on, so one of the things I did was remove some of the fake flowers from the large vase I have on the landing.  It was kind of overstuffed the way I had it before.  It looked okay, but I wanted to be able to appreciate the yellow flowers more and the purple flowers I had in it was kind of overwhelming the vase.  So, I removed them and put them into storage in case I want to switch to purple flowers when I get bored with the look.  I think it came out looking pretty nice (the pictures, on the other hand, were kind of a pain and didn't want to come out looking as nice as the vase did...so enjoy a slight shot of the carbon monoxide detector that hides behind the vase *laugh*).

And there you are folks, there are some of my adventures this week.  Every day is an arm and leg workout around here...I sure ache at the end of the day.  But, hey, I've dropped some weight and the house is looking nice, so it's worth it overall I guess.  And, most importantly, I'm seeing less bugs, so progress!

How about you?  Have a good week?